In one of Barry Rosenthal’s photographs, plastic spoons and beach toys share space with fan blades, a flip-flop and a handful of combs. All of it is trash collected from a New York beach, and all of it is nearly the same color, a bright, summer-sky blue.

But Rosenthal, a photographer, didn’t paint or alter the objects in any way. He just picked up what he found.

“It’s kind of amazing that there’s that much trash out there that I could select one hue of blue for one piece,” Rosenthal, who is based in Brooklyn, told weather.com.

And there is a lot of trash. Manhattan alone generates more than 600,000 tons of garbage every year, with all of New York City generating a combined 3.2 million tons annually. A lot of that washes up on the city’s beaches, and Rosenthal has made it his duty to pick it up.

He first discovered an interest in the city’s trash while working on another project at the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, a bird sanctuary in Long Beach Island, New Jersey. Usually, he found the beach clean and full of plants, but this time, he only saw garbage.

“I kind of expected to find a lot of old stuff, but I realized this was all fresh,” Rosenthal said. “It had just arrived with the high tide or from a storm, and there was a lot of this stuff just littering the sand.”

He grabbed a few bottle caps and photographed them against a white background. But soon, he began collecting garbage full time, bringing it back to his studio, where he spends weeks arranging it for his photographs. He rigged an overhead camera to a display, allowing him to tweak the layout of the photo without climbing on a ladder to look down at his work. None of the garbage or photos are altered in any way.

The goal, Rosenthal says, is simply to create art out of the beauty of trash altered by sun, wind and sand. But it’s begun to take on a greater meaning, both for himself and for those who see his work.

“The project did not begin with an environmental cause in mind at all,” Rosenthal says, adding that at first he just found that trash intriguing. “But after doing this for a number of years, I think that I’ve been influenced by what I find, and it’s changed me.”